


Just Enough

by Leamas



Category: If We Were Villains - M.L. Rio
Genre: Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 12:33:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14873831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leamas/pseuds/Leamas
Summary: Just for a moment, Oliver found himself wanting something else. A surprise; an unexpected turn that could twist the smooth, unflappable confidence that radiated from Richard—no, not confidence. He didn’t even know he did it. Richard was just that sure of his place.On the last night of their third year, Oliver finds himself drunk by the lake with Richard & Meredith.





	Just Enough

Wren and Filippa and James had vanished a few hours ago, along with everyone else looking at an early night—or at least, not a late one. It was almost four in the morning, and from his place in the back-garden Oliver watched the sky begin to lighten. Through the haze of beer and vodka and wine it looked like his eyes were playing tricks on him, but it was so beautiful and his legs were so like lead that he didn’t care, and he was glad that he’d stayed even though he’d promised Filippa that he’d find his way back in due course. This party would rival all others that had slipped through their fingers that year: the final send-off for this year’s fourth years, and the last night that half of his year would be able to call themselves Dellecher students.

“Oliver!”

He turned to see Richard standing in the doorway to the castle, leaning against the frame. Drink had glazed over the most severe of his expression, but he still fixed Oliver with a look heavy enough that he felt it, the sound of the music that had buffeted him around for most of the night turning into a dull heartbeat, no more forceful than his own.

“Are you waiting for someone?” Richard called to him, his words slurring a bit.

“The others left awhile ago,” Oliver said. “I thought you did, too.”

“Really?” Richard asked, waving a hand that was holding a glass of wine. Some of it spilled; he turned his head briefly to watch it fall onto the kitchen tiles, then looked back to Oliver. “I’m having a great time.”

“I think we’re the only third years left here,” Oliver said.

“It’s starting to wind down,” Richard said. He climbed out through the doorway, walking the five metres that separated them at a leisurely pace before taking a seat next to Oliver on the table. Being this close to Richard, close enough that Oliver felt his heavy breathing and the mammoth shape he occupied next to him, the warmth radiating from him and the light blush on his cheek, reminded Oliver very suddenly how cool the air was, and how his own skin prickled in the late-night-cum-early-morning air. This late in the spring, it was a sign of the scorching day ahead.

Oliver looked away from Richard, up to the sky (just wrapping into a dark blue, a violet) and to the imposing silhouette of the castle, with its tower reaching towards the stars. A single light in one of the windows made Oliver ache, and he blinked furiously.

“Sometimes,” Richard said, his voice suddenly low, confessional. “I don’t think it looks real. I don’t think it _could_ be real, a place like this.” Oliver saw that he was looking towards the castle, too, towards the same tower, but higher than the window. Up towards the sky.

“Are you ready to live here next year?” Oliver asked, his voice almost a whisper.

“Yes.”

“There won’t be anything like it.”

“Meredith’s inside,” Richard said, changing the subject abruptly enough to make Oliver drop his gaze to the table, and a message someone wrote on the dark, stained wood in silver ink. “I think she’s had enough now. She says she hasn’t had too much, but we’ll see what she thinks in the morning.”

Oliver snorted.

“Help me bring her back,” Richard said as he stood up, swaying a bit and using the table to balance himself. A deep breath later, and he was heading towards the castle. It was assumed that Oliver would follow, and follow, Oliver did.

Meredith lay by the fireplace, a blanket thrown over her top half, leaving just a ball of fluffy pastel blue fabric with a pair of legs sticking out. One leg was curled up against her, halfway towards the foetal position, while the other stretched out, long and bare. She’d lost her shoes at some point in the night, revealing the toughened skin grown from years dancing.

“Rise and shine,” Richard said as he yanked a blanket off. There was a brief tug of war that neither of them seemed to be winning, but Richard wasn’t in such a state as Meredith. She groaned, turning her face against the carpet, but Richard knelt beside her, wrapping an arm around her shoulder and gently heaving her up. Oliver watched as he pushed her hair away from her face and over her shoulder, leaning in closely to whisper something, to which she nodded. Then he wrapped one of her arms around his shoulder, motioned for Oliver to take the other, and together they pulled her to her feet.

“It better not be morning,” she mumbled as they headed for the door. “I am _not_ in any shape to go anywhere.”

“It will be soon,” Oliver said.

“There’s still time to sleep off the worst of it,” Richard murmured. “Come on.” The door was unlocked, so he easily lifted a foot to kick it outwards. When the three of them manoeuvred themselves through the door, they were met with a clear view of the campus, and the lake, and a clear view of the sunrise, red and bloody in the sky, reflected in the still water.

A knot tightened in Oliver’s throat. They started walking. What attention wasn’t focused on putting one foot in front of the other was cast across the lake, to the sunrise and the trees that hugged the water. There was nothing that Oliver could see that didn’t hold some memory; nowhere for his eyes to land that didn’t hold some hope for what would come next. After tonight… after tomorrow…

He wasn’t ready to go. Just one more year, _please_.

Meredith’s head rolled against his shoulder and he felt her warm breath against his skin. He had to stop for a moment to get a better grip on her, and they could only move again once her feet were firmly on the ground under. Or, well—touching the ground, and carrying some of her weight.

“Did we forget anyone?” she asked, suddenly raising her head and looking at Oliver with her stunning green eyes.

“All the other third years already left,” he murmured.

“Yeah,” Richard said. “Everyone else is someone else’s problem.”

Meredith craned her neck to follow Richard’s voice. She studied him for a moment. “You two… you two look like you could be brothers.”

“Do you think?” Richard and Oliver exchanged a look over her head, and Oliver knew they were both considering this.

“Having a brother would be fun,” Oliver said. “Better than two sisters.”

“I don’t see the resemblance,” Richard said with a grin.

They made it halfway around the lake when Richard insisted that they stopped, setting Meredith on the grass while he rolled the shoulder she’d been leaning on. Oliver dropped down next to her, and the pair of them sort of awkwardly leaned against each other.

“Come on,” Richard said. “We’re halfway there.” Gesturing towards campus, their dorms built up from the side of the building.

“Just a minute,” Oliver said.

“Yeah!” Meredith agreed. “Chill out for once, Richard.”

“Come on,” he said. “You’ve had a minute.”

“Sit with us,” she said, reaching her arm out to him. He took it, and tried to pull her up, but without Oliver’s help the effort was useless and she easily yanked her arm back. Then she patted the ground next to her. They shared a look, a gentle fondness on the face of two people who never tended towards that softness.

“The lake will be here in the morning,” Richard said, although it was morning, and he wasn’t mentioning that tomorrow the beautiful sky would be eclipsed by the more pressing matter of who would go on to the next year—who would be moving to the castle to take their rightful place at the top of Dellecher—and who would be saying goodbye. Possibly on these same shores.

“Sit down,” Meredith ordered. She turned to Oliver. “What if we waited here?”

“Waited for what?” Oliver dumbly asked.

“What do you think?”

Richard either gave up trying to make the pair of them move, or a wave of tiredness from the night before settled on him now that he didn’t have something immediate to work towards, like carrying Meredith home, so he sat beside her.

“Are you worried, Mer?” he asked against her shoulder.

“Are you?”

“No,” he said. “I know where I’ll be tomorrow.”

Just for a moment, Oliver found himself wanting something else. A surprise; an unexpected turn that could twist the smooth, unflappable confidence that radiated from Richard—no, not confidence. He didn’t even know he did it. Richard was just that sure of his place.

It was a mean thought, one that left Oliver feeling guilty and awful as soon as it passed. That guilt would come back to him years later, compounded by future events that would take place near this same lake, that were so far removed from Oliver at the moment that they might as well have happened somewhere else. But that was irrelevant, because he felt awful enough now.

He was hoping for one surprise more than anything, and it only concerned him.

“You know how tomorrow will play out,” Richard was saying. He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear.

“I don’t know,” Meredith slurred. “None of us do.”

“Sure we do.”

“No,” she said, more firmly now, “we don’t.”

“You’re worried,” he said, like he’d just worked her out. “You don’t think you’re going to make it.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you are worried.”

“You know how they like to surprise us.”

“Yes, but do you know what else they like?” Richard asked, challenging Meredith and Oliver to disagree with a glance. “Talent. Skill. _Good actors_. Oliver?”

Oliver jerked his head up. “What?”

“If, tomorrow, you aren’t asked to return next year, what’s the one thing that you’ll regret?”

“There won’t be just one thing,” Oliver said, more honest than he’d intended to be. He couldn’t think of a good way to answer that question. What would he regret most? Every time he held his tongue; every performance where he did just enough, but nothing more. There was no such thing as _just enough_ at Dellecher. He’d been lucky so far.

“Okay, fine,” Richard said. “What’s one thing that you would have wanted to do, that you’d regret?”

“Not graduating,” he said, with a hollow laugh.

“Stop teasing him,” Meredith said, lightly pushing Richard. He shoved her back, right into Oliver, where he found that she fit very well. Maybe it was the drink, or how long he’d been awake, or how beautiful the lake looked this morning—but it could have also been the fact that he knew Richard’s question, knew it very well, because he’d been over it many times. Imagining facing his parents, who would see money down the drain and three wasted years; saying goodbye to James and Filippa, forever; starting over, for lack of other options. Walking away from Dellecher, when he’d so close to having made it. _What would he regret most?_ Whatever the reason, it made him wrap an arm around Meredith and hold her closer. Only the fact that Richard was there stopped him from kissing the back of her head.

“Oh,” Richard said, then laughed.

Meredith laughed too. “But can you blame him, Richard?”

“No.” Richard leaned over and kissed Meredith. She sat up. Oliver thought that Richard was going to pull her onto his lap so they could continue, and suddenly it looked really appealing to make himself scarce.

To his surprise, though, Richard didn’t haul Meredith on top of him. Instead he reached out, making a fist in the front of Oliver’s shirt and pulling him closer. Something flashed across Richard’s face, like he was steeling himself to step out on stage and deliver something deliberate. Oliver should have made himself scarce, should have left them to it, but it was too late for that—

Richard pulled Oliver’s mouth against his. It was over almost as quickly as Richard had reached for him, and then Meredith kissed him. The couple looked at each other. Richard still held Oliver’s shirt in a fist. His other arm was comfortably lazing around Meredith, moving down to her waist to pull her closer. Her hand rested on Oliver’s wrist.

Richard broke the silence first. “I must have had more to drink than I thought.”

“I didn’t,” Meredith said.

Oliver didn’t know how much of what he felt was drink, and how much was something else. He could hear birds singing; music blasting, a car drive by. On the pier of the lake in front of the castle Oliver could see the silhouettes of three students stumbling close to the water, one sitting down and the other two joining him. A moment the one closest to the end slipped into the water and splashed the other two, then grabbed their ankles and dragged them in.

Meredith was looking at Richard, who was looking at the castle. “Well,” he said, as untouchable as ever, “whatever happens tomorrow, you’ll be walking away with that.”


End file.
